I’ve found it hard keeping up to date with the blog as once I fall behind, there’s so much to say that I lose interest. But tomorrow morning I will post a few mighty updates after my morning double espresso. In the meantime I’ll tell you a story about the trek which was one of the highlights for me.

It was day 7 and we had reached an elevation of 3,000m at a place called Manang. Manang is a small Tibetan influenced village with incredible mud houses hundreds of years old. Day 7 was our acclimatisation day and we were meant to spend the day resting, getting used to the altitude, and hopefully increasing the amount of red blood cells to cope with the reduction in oxygen as we climbed.

We did a short but very steep 500m ascent up a mountain on one side of the village of Manang. Up there was a spectacular view of the village, a violent river, and a panoramic view of endless mountains dotted with buffalo, goats, and an incredible glacier. On the other side of the village, directly opposite us, was a much higher mountain which I guess was about 1,500m high. About 1,000m above the village set into this mountain was one lonely white house, a small white speck.

Leading up to this house were incredibly steep switch backs (a path that zig zags upwards) which looked very dangerous. I asked our guide what the white house was and he told me that a monk lived up there. I was astonished as this was 4,000m above sea level and 1,000m above the village - incredible isolation. The monk had lived in this house for 35 years in meditation and was now 90 years old. He never left the house, ever, and his family carried food and water up to him daily.

It was things like this which made the trek so unique. Beyond the scenery, we met people and saw things so distinct and foreign that you would not experience them anywhere else in the world. Here we were, a 7 day walk into the mountains of Nepal, 3,000m high, looking up at a place where a man has sat in meditation for 35 years. A renouncer who has left the world to focus the mind in an attempt to stop generating any negative karma which would continue to bind him to the cycle of death and rebirth.

A lot of people would say this is a wasted life and a lot of Buddhists would agree - meaningful engagement in the world is a central tenet of Buddhism and is tied up with the notion of compassion and the Bodhisattva (of which the Delai Lama is believed to be a reincarnation)- putting off one’s own liberation from suffering to help others.

We sat up on this mountain for a few hours and just talked, with no one to hear us but the soft flowing  pure air, the birds, and the sound of the water from the glacier. Shane and I threw rocks and I naturally dominated at hitting our set targets. The simplicity and profundity of that moment has etched itself into my fondest memories of life, and to me that cemented what I hope to be a life long friendship with Shane and Nicola.

Hi everyone,

Thanks for tuning into the blog and posting all the great comments! This will be my last blog post for the next 21 days as Shane, Nicola and I head high up into the Annapurna region. Nepal has been incredible, but now I’m ready to see the ‘real’ Nepal.

Right now we’re in Pokhara, and tomorrow morning at 6.30am we get a 4 hour bus with our guide and porter, and begin our 300km walk. Shane and Nicola have crushed my idealized opinion of walking ‘into the wild’ and I now see this as a grueling 21 days of pain in basic living conditions. On day 10, we ascend to Thorung La Pass which reaches an altitude of 5,416m, totaling 8 hours of trekking. Walking for 8 hours in one day is difficult enough, but combining this with an elevation of over 1,000m and 50% less oxygen in the air, I’m feeling rather ill prepared.

But we’re all excited by the challenge, and the Annapurna region is one of the most magnificent places on earth so I’m sure it will be worth it. I’ll be documenting the adventure in my diary which I’ll transcribe to the blog as soon as I get back.

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to upload the bungee jump and giant swing to youtube. I re-encoded the DVD to avi but I ended up with two files of 27mb each and it’s impossible to upload that on these connections. Might have to wait until we get to London! Some guy took some photos of me though so I’ll put them up after the trek (I’m waiting on an email from him).

I hope you have enjoyed reading the blog so far, and I thought I’d leave you with one last anecdote from yesterday.

I was sitting at the computer on the ground level of my hotel, chatting on MSN to Tali, when I heard a crashing/toppling sound from upstairs followed by an extended scream of agony. It sounded like a woman had fallen down the stairs and broken a bone, so I rushed up the flight of stairs with the hotel staff and looked around. Strangely there was no one around and we all looked at each other trying to identify the source of the commotion.

All of a sudden, the room door opposite mine is yanked open and a woman in her 30’s runs out stark naked screaming. Behind her was a white man who was very tanned with a outrageous beard that came to his nipples and black flaring eyes (true rage is held in the eyes). He was dressed in all the hippy gear and looked sufficiently wild. He kicked her hard in the bum on her way out and yelled some abuse in another language. She went running up the next flight of stairs in the nude while he cursed her from the doorway. Inside their room was a stifling amount of burning incense and some trippy music. I’m not sure if it was some perverse sexual act gone wrong, but it was quite bizarre. The hotel staff were very embarrassed by the nudity and the situation dissipated as quickly as it had begun. I walked back downstairs to MSN and typed “Tali, you won’t believe what just happened”.

That’s all folks. Hope to see you again from the 26th August onwards!

Last night I met up with Lala and one of his friends, Sunil. Sunil owns an export company distributing pasmina, silk, and semi precious stones all over the world. He’s only 24, but already he has 4 people working for him and partnerships with different factories in Nepal and India.

Sunil’s story was incredible and a real inspiration. He grew up in a remote village in north India. From the age of 6-13 he was a fisherman and a farmer. His family were very poor, and until he was 13, he’d never seen a car or a white person. Then, at 13 he came to Kathmandu on his own and begun to work in a factory. Over the next 5 years he went from sweeping the floors, to filling orders, to eventually being the manager. He learned to speak Nepalese as well as 6 other languages (enough to sell things to tourists).

He set up a few companies and a few of them failed. Then, he set up his current export business and took a different approach. He thought that everyone in Kathmandu was too focused on ‘today’ and didn’t think about ‘tomorrow’. Store owners hassled customers to come into their shop, and this meant that every store was in bitter competition with each other. He said they were always trying to pick the fruit off the trees, rather than planting a tree and picking the fruit later.

Sunil focused on developing good karma in which he began to develop relationships with people by doing nice things for them without pressuring them to buy anything. Like inviting people over for dinner, showing them around Nepal etc. Gradually he built up a network of friends from all over the world, and they began to tell their friends about Sunil’s shop. When these people came to Kathmandu, they would come straight to him. So through doing nice things for other people and developing good karma, business began to grow. In the west, relationship building is the key to sales, and what he did was develop a very successful referral scheme. This has now grown into a full export company and now isn’t focused on retail, but wholesale.

I really liked the way Sunil thought about things because his opinion is that ‘what goes around comes around’. He said people have taken advantage of him over time, but he believes if you constantly do good things for other people, then the favours will be returned, and success will come your way.

At his house, we chatted over dinner for a few hours, eating rice and curry with our hands. It was the first time since I have been away that I felt comfortable in the company of friends. I’ve been spending all my time walking around, and then being alone in a small hotel room, and it was nice to chat in a house.

The power was out so we had candles lit all over the room, and Sunil was burning incense. Then we did some meditation and I was amazed at how easily I was able to clear my mind of thoughts. Back home I just hadn’t been able to meditate because my mind was always going 100 miles an hour and I couldn’t silence it. I guess it shows how much I’ve relaxed since leaving, and I now feel like I’m settling into holiday life.

The night went on and I thoroughly enjoyed myself. Sitting in the quiet dark with the flickering lights of the candles, the crackling of the incense, and our voices speaking softly about the simplicity of life. It was great speaking to someone who thought in such a fundamentally different way to me, or anyone else I know. However when he started talking about flying to different dimensions when he meditates (for 5 hours at a time) he lost me.

Shane arrived last night and I’m seeing the two of them tonight. I also found a cinema showing Batman so I’m going to see that now. Stoked!

Tomorrow Sunil and I are going to hire a motorbike and  spend the day driving around some local villages in the mountains where I will apparently get the best local food.

On Tuesday Shane, Nicola and I head 6 hours on a bus to Pokhara to begin the trek.

Yesterday I finally got to go and do the famous bungee jump of Nepal (third highest in the world at 160m). I had to be at the bus stop at 5.45am, and I had asked the hotel manager to call me at 5.30 to wake me up. However I woke up and thought I had answered the phone, so I got up, got dressed, and walked downstairs to check the clock. It was 4.15am… Bad start.

The bus ride there was a bit dicey and we got stopped by groups of guys multiple times along the whole way who were demanding money. From what I can gather, the protesting is a result of a speech the new vice president made. He is an Indian, and he delivered his first speech in Hindi whilst wearing Indian clothing. He is bilingual and speaks Nepalese, so the people saw this as a slap in the face.

There is a lot of deep seeded conflict between Nepal and India, and the vice presidents refusal to apologise had really upset everyone as they feel India is imposing on their independence. However what has started as protesting for a cause has degenerated into people using it as an opportunity to get some cash (blocking roads and demanding cash from buses). There is a definite lawless feel to the roads outside of Kathmandu where there isn’t an army presence.

Anyway, we finally got there and parked right next to the bridge we were going to jump off. It crosses a gorge with a raging river below. The bridge is suspended 160 meres in the air, and as you walk across it, it sways. When I first looked down, it was so damn high I couldn’t comprehend actually diving off it.

The mountains around there are awesome. There’s waterfalls plummeting from the top to the bottom, the water weaving its way through channels carved in the rocks over time. It’s higher than I thought it’d be, and that first look really separated the men from the boys (and the one girl who actually did the biggest dive).

Extreme situations are funny because they strip away any facade people are putting on, and you see the real self. The American guy who was the ‘talker’ of the group went absolutely mute and kept looking from one shoe to another. Other than that, most of the people were scared, but excited.

We had a quick briefing and then it was time for the jump. It was done by weight, and out of 15 people I was the fourth heaviest at 70kg. All the Nepalese guys were in the 50’s or low 60kg’s. One guy was 48kg. They’re tiny!!!

When it was my turn, I inched my way to the edge, feet strapped tightly together, and looked down. There was a guy standing at the bottom and he was a speck. There was nothing below me or around me, I was out on the platform with only a rope tied to my ankles. Adrenaline seeped through my stomach and through my arms and legs, and they felt like jelly. At this point I started to really feel the anxiety and my heart was beating out of my chest. I put my arms out to the side, waved to the camera, and did a big superman jump off the edge.

For the next 3 seconds I couldn’t think, process, breath or react. It was just an eternity of sheer terror, like the body can’t believe you’re continuing to fall towards the ground. All I felt was fear fear fear. You fall, then you fall, then you keep falling. The feeling was so extreme it was like I couldn’t take it. I bounced back up and my brain kicked into gear and it was the most incredible rush I’ve ever felt and I can’t compare it to anything else. I bounced a few times and I was just muttering “omg omg” over and over, and laughing to myself. It was indescribable, exhilarating, and overwhelming.

The 160m climb back up the mountain was a mission and I made friends with one leech, though our friendship was fleeting. I wanted to do it again, so second time around I did the giant swing. The swing has a longer free fall, but it isn’t as intense. I would describe the bungee as more terrifying and the swing as more fun. You can see everything around you, and you jump off the edge rather than dive.

The DVD is going to be developed today, and I will upload it to youtube as soon as I can (probably tomorrow).

If you ever get the chance to do a big bungee jump, DO IT. It’s now one of my favourite life memories and every time I think of it, I smile and shake my head. SOO awesome.

The bus ride home was intense and there were constant groups of people (over 100 each time) burning straw vice presidents. There was so much fire that the smoke was thick in the air. Some of the straw presidents were 3 metres high and lit in the middle of the road. Hopefully the situation gets resolved, because seeing little kids running around holding flaming straw is crazy to say the least.

I’m feeling a bit lonely today because I’m struggling with the constant light conversations with people. I’ve met a few Europeans, but none whose first language is english. It’s not that I want d&m conversations, but when language is a barrier, humour is lost without the context. I haven’t really laughed properly with anyone - all my humour back home is stupid random jokes and I haven’t found anyone who gets it yet, and laughter is the rhythm of my soul. I’m looking forward to seeing Shane and Nicola next week.

Today I went for a walk to a place called Patan which is about an hour away from where I am staying. There are great markets there and it is so cheap that I could fill a suitcase worth of stuff for less than $100. Belts, watches, clothes, shoes - were only a few dollars - it’s crazy. It makes me laugh how ripped off we get back home. The west has really mastered the art of separating form from function, and convincing us that a piece of clothing can be worth 100 times its value because the shape or design is different to something else. When I get back, I might get into branding - it’s at the heart of the capitalist spirit.

The sky was clear today and I had a perfect view of the surrounding mountains. They were a misty blue as though I was looking at them from underwater. The mountains refracted with the heat waves and hazy pollution which the sun was cutting through giving it a dreamy appearance, like a fish bending underwater when the rays of light shine down.

On the way to Patan I saw the really poor side of Kathmandu. People here are so poor that I wouldn’t know where to start in trying to explain how much we pay for things in Australia. Heaps of people I talk to are super impressed that I can drive a car, and that my parents can too. A guy I was talking to at my hotel ( one of the staff members) was interested in hearing about Australia. I told him that houses cost over $1,000,000 and we have to work incredibly hard all our life just to pay it off. I was talking about ‘living to work’, how Australians don’t see their families enough because we do such long hours, stressed out in peak hour traffic - the whole shebang.

I was cruising along nicely on my bandwagon when he interjected and asked how many hours we work on average. I told him I worked about 10 hours a day but then I had 2 hours travel time on top.

He told me that he worked 16 hours a day (6am until 10pm), 6 days a week, and that he rode his push bike to get to the hotel because there was no way he could ever afford a car. Then, when he got his annual holiday, he went back to his local village and worked in the rice fields to help out his family. He got married 10 days before but hadn’t had a honeymoon because he couldn’t afford it and couldn’t get time off work.

I shut up pretty quick after that and I don’t think I’ll be complaining about Australian life to anyone else in Nepal or India. It has made me think a lot about the bigger questions in life, but the two main ones are:

1) How lucky we are to be born white, into money, education, and a safe country like Australia. It’s made me realise that no matter how hard I work, or how much I seize the good opportunities which present themselves, I’ll never ‘deserve’ the good fortune I have. It’s just luck that there are opportunities in front of me. Some people choose to grab those opportunities and some people don’t grab them. The critical point is that the opportunities are there in the first place. The fact I can go to SEEK and there’s thousands of jobs paying good money is incomprehensible in a place like Nepal.

For some bizarre reason I was born into priviledge when most of the world is born into a pit of inescapable struggle. Most of the world works hard - harder than I ever will, and they’ll never get anywhere because there isn’t an opportunity for them to be successful. Most people remain the proletariat and never really earn much more than they produce. Back home I get paid for ideas, and if an idea can make someone money then I can earn a lot of money. Most of those ideas come from a long history of education which taught me to think. But when you live in a shithole and shift dirt all day, or beg, there’s no escape - the value of your labour is always restricted. I’ve realised what an incredible arrogance it is to think you deserve your success and other people who ‘fail’ don’t deserve it. It’s purely luck.

I’m not trying to take anything away from people who work hard and are successful - I respect that totally and one day I hope I can be successful too, I guess I’m just realising the full extent of how lucky I am - people always say it, but it’s the first time I’ve actually experienced it.

If it comes down to luck and chance - I ended up as Daniel in Sydney and someone else ended up as Deepak in an Indian slum - what does that say about purpose and meaning? If it is just ‘chance’ and I exist for no other reason than a random chain of events causing atoms to arrange in a certain way, do our lives have any meaning/importance? And I don’t know what’s worse, the notion of chance or fate - you can’t control either, but at least fate makes you think there’s some rhythm to the madness. Chance is like rolling the dice and relinquishing any power we believe we have.

Even if there is a purpose, how can we justify our good fortune versus other people’s misery?

Do we just gain meaning through relationships?

If we don’t have relationships, do we not have meaning?

We believe that life has an inherent value but when you look around here, it makes you wonder. I know this is a rant but it’s a hard thing to come to terms with coming from Australia to here. When I go for walks here and see desperate people living in piles of feculent rubbish, eyes hollow and scabs covering their bodies, I don’t get it and it doesn’t make sense.

2) The second thing the conversation made me realise is that although I concede that most of the world works harder than I ever will, and I’m insanely lucky to be Australian, how do I reconcile the fact that I wasn’t happy doing what I was doing back home despite my privilege? I don’t know what’s worse: to have nothing and hope for everything, or to have everything and feel like you have nothing (hopeless). Even if you know you have everything, you can still feel unhappy because it’s not enough.

I’ve found that the people here who have nothing have a kind of complacent simplicity and acceptance of their fate (or chance - which suggests they’re just unlucky) and I envy that.

How can you reconcile not feeling satisfied when you have more than virtually everyone else? I should be satisfied but I wasn’t, and in 7-8 months I’ll be back doing the same thing - working, eating and sleeping through life and I wonder if after seeing how shit the rest of the world lives, I’ll change my state of mind and view things differently. In the end that’s all happiness is - a state of mind. You can be happy in any situation, and it’s not situations which make life good, it’s perspective.

The more you have, the more you want, right? I guess this is the key question I was asking before I left, and although I know the theoretical answer, I want to be able to put it into practice. It’s easy to be happy when you’re gallivanting around the world on a credit card, but somehow I need to change my state of mind for when I come back, so hopefully the trip helps with that.

Anyway, I’m going to go have a beer

Well my plans fell through today. I decided not to walk and get the bus which turned out to be a good idea. There are political strikes going on and all the major roads have been blocked off preventing buses getting in and out of Kathmandu (lucky I didn’t walk into a protest).

Up until now these have been peaceful, but someone just told me the crowd have begun throwing stones. On the news there are crowds of people hitting sticks into fires and chanting political songs. The army is walking the streets with full riot gear on, and while it’s all precautionary, it still feels dodgy seeing the army walking around with Ak-47’s.

There are peaceful protests going on in the streets, but I have to say I’m a little nervous about the possibility of escalation. People have sticks with material wrapped around the top which I assume they will light after dark. I haven’t been able to work out exactly what the issue is, but from what I can gather it has to do with the election of the vice president. Any group of people protesting for a ’cause’ in a politcally driven and passionate way scare me. Especially in a third world country with a history of political turmoil.

So for now I’m staying pretty close to the hotel. People are saying it could get resolved today or it may last another 1-2 days. For the next day or so I will get some good reading in and relax in the sun, and hopefully everything simmers. I have the bungee jump booked for Wednesday so hopefully that route isn’t blocked off then! It’s definitely an eye opener coming from democratic Australia to here, and lying in bed listening to the outside chants is disconcerting. Why can’t everyone just get on eh?

Two nights ago I had a horrible sleep. I had a bad rash on my neck and left arm, and I was ravished without mercy from mosquitoes. There is no crazier sight than a man standing on his bed in his undies, middle of the night, holding a pillow defensively and crouching with raging eyes darting left to right, searching for the origin of the ‘buzzing’. I was actually speaking out loud “cmon you bastard, show yourself”.

I woke up in the morning and my state of mind had changed. Instead of seeing the Nepali as friendly, I saw them as annoying. I was tired, grumpy, and itchy everywhere. So I decided to set off on a mission and walked 5km to a place called Balaju and climbed into the mountains. I finally found some solitude with no one talking to me, and no sound but the crunch of my feet in the dirt. I cleared my head and had a good think about things in the simplicity of the green rolling hills.

It was over 30 degrees and I was sweating like a pig. But it felt good to get in the heat and fresh air, and listening to Powderfinger - Internationalist made me smile and think of Australia.

I walked for about 5 hours and I was absolutely spent. The heat really takes it out of you here, and my backpack was hurting my neck. I came back and had dinner with Lala and his friend, then went home and crashed.

Today I’m heading to a place called Nagarkot which is 32km east of Kathmandu. At the top (2195m), there is a lookout which has a spectacular view of the Himalaya, and on a clear day you can see Everest. The sun rises from behind the mountains and many people have told me the sunrise is a highlight of Nepal.

I’m not sure if I’m going to walk there or get the bus. 36km may be a little ambitious with a backpack, because once I get halfway, there is no turning back. Either way, it should be a good two days and I’m looking forward to doing some proper trekking.

Away

Thanks everyone for the comments. I love reading them everyday

Photos are now up on Flickr. Sorry for the low quality but it has taken me hours to upload (slow connection)

http://www.flickr.com/photos/25947232@N02/

Well I got back from Chitwan National Park yesterday and it was everything I expected it to be. I woke up in the morning and we started the day riding down the river in a dug out canoe. On either side of the bank were crocodiles which was neat, but because it is monsoon season, we only saw a few as they mostly stay in the water.

Once we got to the end of the river, we walked through the jungle for about an hour to the elephant sanctuary. The walk was fun and because there’s so much rain, the grass was over 2m high. We saw tiger footprints which the guide said were from the day before, so I had my fingers crossed we’d see one on the elephant ride. The elephant sanctuary was good - basically a lot of elephants standing around.

That afternoon it was time for the elephant ride through the jungle. I had 3 Japanese tourists on my one and they spoke very little english. It was great being with them though because Japanese get very excited at the sight of anything - they were deadset snapping pictures of dragonflies.

One of my lifelong ambitions has been to do a safari in Africa, so the thought of seeing rhinos and tigers got me very pumped! The guide told us it was very rare to see either because tigers come out at night, and there are only 406 rhinos left in the park (2 had been killed for their horns in the past 3 months). After about 15 minutes of going through thick jungle, we came out into a clearing and standing out in the open were two rhinos - a mother and her baby!! The mother was huge and the baby was the cutest little thing in the world.

We rode close on the elephant and they just stood there while we watched them for about 5 minutes. The baby was running around like an uncordinated child taking it’s first steps. It was running in circles and waving its head around. I was stoked and the excitment was heightened by the Japanese laughing and smiling. Over the next 2 hours we saw deer, barking deer, spotted deer, monkeys, boar, lots of birds, and another rhino. What a day! That night a group of us went to the local restaurant for some beers though most of them were gimps so I didn’t hang around long.

The bus back was much safer but it was insanely hot - over 30 degrees and really humid. the trip took 6.5 hours and it’s impossible to read because it’s so bumpy. When I got back, my face was black with dirt from the exhaust of the trucks and all the dust blowing in the window. My shirt was covered in dirt and I was feeling pretty seedy. I bumped into Nicola and felt like a ratbag, so I went and had a shower and then met her and her friend for dinner.

We went to a middle eastern restaurant because Nicola is sick of eating Nepali food. She has been doing volunteer physio work for the past month just outside of Kathmandu working with 30 children who are seriously disabled. The stories she told me were full on, like children being strapped to chairs because they go crazy when they run around (severely autistic). Other kids have mangled arms and backs which are so deformed they just roll around on the floor. I have a lot of respect for her doing the month there because I don’t think I could handle it.

Dinner was fun and it was good to have a free flowing english conversation. However after sitting on the couches for a few hours, I had hundreds of little bites all over my neck and left arm. So we went and got a coffee and have arranged to meet on Wednesday. Thursday we’re going to go do the 160m bungee jump - well I am, Nicola will film it

I think tomorrow I’m going to do a mission in the hills for 3 days. I’m meeting a friend today who is going to show me how to meditate which I’m keen for. Then tonight I’m going to his place for dinner and to meet his family. And that’s it really! I’m uploading photos now though it has taken an hour to do 6 so I’ll probably give up soon.

Check the photos here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/25947232@N02/

Away